SHOPPING & HIRING GUIDES

How to Save Money on Flowers

By Mary Forsell

Blooming Basics

You can start cutting costs even before you talk with your florist. Rather than compiling a must-have list of flowers, pick a color scheme. That way, your florist can choose from whatever is available in your palette at the best possible price.

Also, think ahead to what will be in season. At the height of spring, for instance, daffodils are a third of their usual price, as are zinnias in summer. Chic and cheap, hydrangeas and sunflowers are widely available from late summer into fall. Winter brings a slew of reasonably priced greens and berried branches. If you’re having a September wedding and crave fragrant lilies of the valley, a springtime flower, you’ll pay through the nose. (Check out the site freshroses.com for examples of month-by-month floral availability.)

Saving money by attempting to do the arrangements yourself is madness—bouquets should be put together no more than 24 hours before the wedding, and you’ll be otherwise occupied. However, if a friend has the time and talent, you can economize by ordering in bulk from a wholesale market, a farmer’s market, or web sites such as freshflowersandmore.com and fiftyflowers.com.

Bargain Bouquets

Bouquets made from one kind of flower not only look fresh and contemporary, but also trim costs, says David Stark, a partner in Avi Adler, a Brooklyn, New York, event design firm. “When you do mixed arrangements, you have to buy much more than you need,” he explains. (At wholesale flower markets, flowers are sold in bunches of 10 to 12 stems or in groupings of 10 to 12 bunches.) Stark’s creations often feature flowers that have big heads, like peonies, hydrangeas, sunflowers, and dahlias, which produce lots of drama but a small stem count.

Inexpensive fruits, acorns, and tiny pinecones can also stand in for blooms. “We recently did bouquets of white daffodils with orange centers mixed with kumquats,” says Stark. “They looked lavish but were actually quite economical.”

Remember the garden bouquets you picked as a child? Charming and spontaneous-looking, they’re ideal for a country wedding. “For a casual ceremony, nothing could be sweeter than a grouping of traditional daisies with yellow centers, hand-tied with a yellow-and-white polka-dot ribbon,” says Ron Padgett, creative director of Two Design Group, a floral decor specialist in Dallas.

At a fraction of the price of flowers, ribbons make good budget sense, says Padgett, especially when you’re working with a difficult color scheme. There are very few blue flowers in nature—and those that exist tend to be expensive—so for a recent azure-themed wedding, he wired loops of blue-striped ribbon into a white bouquet of lilacs and peonies.

Ceremony Savers

The ceremony is the perfect place to use familiar, bargain-priced flowers in ways traditionally reserved for luxury blooms. All eyes are on you, not the decorations, so no one will notice that the flowers are not the rarest of the rare. Padgett masses baby’s breath in antique white urns on the altar and drops them into cones to decorate pews. For a splash of color, he also suggests hanging twin carnation wreaths on church doors.

“If it’s a pretty church, why do too much?” says Wayne Woods, owner of The Woods, a Beverly Hills florist. “All you need is something to flank the couple.” Woods suggests two tall silver candelabra with vines twisted around their arms and bases. For outdoor ceremonies, Woods doesn’t gild the lily. “In a natural setting, I want to create something that will blend in,” he says. So when couples marry under canopies or archways, Woods decorates with vines, including asparagus fern, jasmine, and stephanotis, often with small, scattered clusters of wired oranges. “By using greenery, I save two-thirds of the cost of using flowers.”

Keep in mind that ceremony arrangements can live two lives, doing double-duty at the reception. Position altar decorations around the buffet and cake tables. Use the same ball-top topiary trees that served as church step accents to flank the band at the reception. In general, rented plants are a budget-friendly way to fill in corners. But focus beyond ficus: Flowering trees, bamboo, and even banana trees are available.

Amazing Vases

Guests spend a lot of time looking at the centerpieces, so put your money on the table. For a young, literally dirt-cheap design, Stark suggests planting a tabletop garden. “We use wheatgrass grown from wheatberries planted in flats [shallow boxes]. In ten days it’s ready.” Place inexpensive daisies in plastic florist’s tubes and insert into the soil; run ribbon around the flat’s edges to hide the turf. Or you could highlight a single spectacular flower in an intriguing container, like a white calla lily rising from a square clear glass vase filled with black stones. For more color, tint the water a pale hue.

Play with your container’s design, says Stark. Among his favorite decorating materials are stickers (think about multicolored polka dots on a clear glass vase). He’ll also place a water-saturated cage of florist’s foam on top of a vase and cover it with flowers, allowing him to fill the vase with anything he likes, such as alternating layers of colored aquarium sand.

When budgets are tight, Woods suggests “keeping it simple on purpose.” For instance, you can float a few flowers in a gorgeous bowl, surrounded by votives. Scattering rose petals on tabletops is a well-known way of stretching a blossom, and Padgett offers a twist: Arrange them around candles in a geometric form, whether squares, circles, or rectangles. It’s a designer look, yet ridiculously easy to do.

When it comes to other areas of the reception, aim for impact. Rather than distributing little arrangements on pedestals and tabletops all over the room, use your flower fund to create one or two larger compositions, advises Woods. “Use a single color to create the illusion of more.” Speaking of color, choosing fashion-forward combinations can create an expensive look. For instance, chocolate brown cosmos and creamy white mini calla lilies are immensely popular. Pair them with pink or lime flowers and linens and you’ll create a million-dollar mood.

Other Arrangements

Beyond the orchid: centerpiece possibilities:

Fill a low bowl with garden roses, peaches, and mint.

Crown a cast-stone garden cherub with a tiny wreath of jasmine vine, for a romantic Victorian look.

Arrange camellia leaves and a single gardenia in a footed silver bowl. Extend the tableau by surrounding it with four candlestickswith tall white tapers.